No location point at start of second voice -- how to add rest?

• Apr 26, 2019 - 15:28

Hello. I have a two-voice staff in 4/4. Voice 1 begins with a whole rest. The melody begins in Voice 2, but only after a quarter rest. The score currently indicates the whole rest in V1, but there is no visible quarter rest in V2, just three beats' worth of notes. It plays properly (i.e. the first notes plays on the second beat), but I would like to make the quarter rest at the start of V2 appear in the score. But there is no location point for me to select in V2 to add the rest. How can I simply add the quarter rest before the notes in V2?
Thanks


Comments

In reply to by Robert41

Normally you would enter the notes and rests left to right, just as you read them - that should be intuitive enough. Sounds like maybe somehow you got your score into a situation where you had notes in voice 2 that were missing the initial rests That wouldn't normally happen in regular usage - you'd have had no choice but to enter the rests first. Anyhow, when your score gets into a strange state like what is apparently the case here, you sometimes need to take strange steps to get it back to normal.

If things still seem unclear, feel free to attach your discuss and tell us what you can about it how got into that state (eg, maybe you initially entered rests then accidentally deleted them?)

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Yes, it's intuitive enough to try do things right the first time. Thanks for your offer to see how the score got into this condition, but in this case the original score wasn't mine. But that's besides the point: however the situation was arrived at, I would have expected simply adding a rest to the beginning of an existing score to be about as straightforward as could be, and apparently it's not. Don't get me wrong, I'm very impressed by the software - and the community and knowledge base - but your post seems to suggest that it's up to the user to do things right the first time, and if editing is required later, well that's something else altogether. The very fact that someone knew that this problem can be fixed by exchanging voices twice suggests that maybe it's not an unheard-of situation.
But maybe it's just me. The software is powerful, and I guess I just need to spend more time with it to get a feel for how it "thinks".
Thanks again for your replies.

In reply to by Robert41

Normally editing a score to make changes is easy. Unfortunately the user who created this particular score did something very ill-advised, using the wrong feature to achieve the effect they wanted, and you paid the price. We have considered simply removing the feature they misused in order to avoid this happening, but users have insisted on us keeping the feature despite the bad side effects.

You can also select the first note, enter note entry mode, change to voice 2 and press 5 0 to enter a quarter rest. This will always start you at the beginning of the measure and you can reenter whatever needs reentered in other voices.

In reply to by mike320

This also worked, so thank you. This solution makes a little more sense, as I can understand what's happening at each step. Still I don't think I would have figured out that to enter something in Voice 2 I need to go through Voice 1.
I'm new to MuseScore, and I can appreciate that it can do a lot. But I have to admit it's taking a while to "get" its approach. I've used Noteworthy for years, and they operate very differently.

In reply to by Robert41

Not sure what you mean about going "through" voice 1, that's not normally necessary in any meaningful sense. Just go to note input mode, select a voice, enter notes.

I definitely recommend reading the documentation on how multiple voices work, it should clear up a lot of confusion. The process is quite similar to Finale and Sibelius and indeed most other notation programs.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

In my original situation, if I have the first note in Voice 2 selected and I go into note input mode, I cannot get into the position where I can insert the rest. I need to select a note/rest in Voice 1, and only then will going into note input mode put me in a position where I can switch to Voice 2 and add my rest. Simple enough, I suppose, once you know it. But as my problem was with Voice 2, how was I to guess that I needed to be out of Voice 2 before I could solve the problem?

I don't deny that I have a lot of my own homework to do: I'm just noting what I find curious as a first-time user. Maybe some developers might actually find this useful.

In reply to by Robert41

It is useful feedback indeed. I have long argued we should not allowed users to shoot themselves in the foot by putting scores into this state - we should prevent it by eliminating the ability to delete rests and instead simply mark them invisible. So, next time the subject comes up, I can point to this discussion in support of that idea.

Anyhow, my point in explaining things to you is so that you can hopefully be comforted in understanding that the situation you encountered is not the norm - it only happened because the person who created the score did so in a way that made it hard to edit. Had they simply hidden the first rest instead of deleting it, all would be fine. In normal usage, entering and editing your own music, this would not ever happen. Normally, you can enter notes into voice 2 directly.

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.